NCLB and the Edwards proposal - like all federal K-12 initiatives - are an attempt to level out that variation, which is seen by some as a bad thing. Unfortunately these initiatives usually fail to take into account the reasons for variation from district to district, and try to treat the symptoms without looking at the disease. What’s worse, it treats them all the same way, when the problems that afflict one district or state and cause it to perform poorly can be very different from the causes of problems in another.

Federal bureacracy only puts in place rules that are further removed from the local causes for underperformance.

Also, in a nation the size of the US, I think we have to concede that there will always be some areas that will perform better than others.

I am simply saying that taking the current system and simply trying to layer on new requirements creates far more bureaucracy than it does education.

And, to be fair, many European countries are more comparable in size to US states, so it would depend on what we are comparing.

Additionally, my oldest son’s last two years were in a public magnet school, and he learned violin and classical guitar. It can be done, but it certainly isn’t being done universally.

Indeed.

The NCLB-type efforts are pretty lame and not nearly as impactful as the politicos suggest.

Yep.

Given the realities of education financing–the fact that public schools get most of their money from municipal and state sources–these political gestures are pandering at its worst.

I would have more sympathy if someone like Edwards said, “education in the US needs a Marhsall Plan-type of involvement from the Feds” and then proposed a policy to match. The NCLB-type efforts are pretty lame and not nearly as impactful as the politicos suggest.